I attended the TFIA community information session in Huonville this week in the hope of promoting my blackwood growers cooperative proposal and gaining some understanding of where things are at with the Tasmanian Forest Industry Agreement (TFIA).

I also went seeking an update on possible Government funding options for the blackwood coop. This was the first of a series of information sessions being run around the State this week.

It turned into something of a farce. Depending upon who I spoke to, I was either told that no forestry-related projects would be eligible for funding under the TFIA; or that commercially viable, robust forestry projects would be eligible for funding.

I can only assume that the current level of confusion between the parties regarding funding under the TFIA will be resolved at some point.

If good forestry-related projects are indeed excluded from TFIA funding then the forest industry has the very clear message from both State and Federal Governments that it has lost all political support. That would be an extraordinary situation. In the mean time I am launching a web site to help gain support and interest in the Blackwood Cooperative proposal.

Anyone who is interested in supporting the Coop proposal, particularly farmers/landowners who are interested in growing commercial blackwood, are encouraged to visit the web site.

The more support and interest there is for this project, the greater the chance of gaining funding support.

Otherwise I found the information session very useful and enjoyable, and encourage people to attend.

Details of the remaining meetings are:
Smithton RSL - November 24 – 5-8pm, Triabunna Town Hall - December 1 – 5-8pm. All interested members of the community are encouraged to come along to find information and ask any questions about the Agreement.

Commentposted on http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/comments/18510/
To harvest these E. nitens plantations at the age of 35 to 45 years is just silly.
The 15 year cut-off for nitens pulpwood is because the lignin content increases with age.
Lignin turns sap wood into heart wood. Without age hard woods are useless
Even at 50 to 75 years of age they are laying down twice as much wood as trees half their age.
Trees do not slow down growth rates until quite old.
None of these nitens plantations should be clear felled but be heavily thinned and interplanted with more useful types or undersown with grass seed to turn them into dual purpose grazing and timber operations.
Here seems a perfect candidate for interplanting where possible.

Posted by J A Stevenson on 24/11/11 at 10:15 AM

Stevo, lignin (the second most abundant biological compound on earth) is formed at the cambium (the separation point between the bark and the sapwood) at the same time as the cellulose (the most abundant).

One cell in from the cambium the proportions are set and don’t change. You may be referring to extractives that are laid down during the transformation from live sapwood (with active defence against pathogens) to inert heartwood, which rely on the extractives to perform a physical and chemical obstruction to fungusseses. Eventually that defense is breached - eg hollow trees.

And of course the extractives give black(heart)wood its dark colour, and the higher relative durability of heartwood to sapwood in service. For pulping it’s the opposite, as extractives clag up the pipes. So trees cropped for pulp are best with less heartwood, eg younger…

A wood alchemist’s dream for blackwood would be to come up with a pre-harvest injection that would turn all that pesky white sapwood into nice dark billiard-table quality heartwood. A blackwood siliculturalist’s dream would include coming up with blackwood that grows at actual economic rates and doesn’t require more tending than the Hanging Gardens of Babylonia. Both dreams are unrealized to date.

By all means get along to Dr B’s meetings, growing and tending blackwood is fun, spiritually rewarding, and may become financially rewarding. Don’t wait for the handouts, just whack in a few hectares on a good sheltered site. For best results, cultivate the soil, use the right genotypes, control the weeds (control = death), control the possums (Tibetan prayer flags perhaps?) and sharpen your secateurs. You will be using them a lot.

Stevo’s agroforestry idea for nitens is nice, trouble is cows love rubbing their horns on the bark. It’s cheaper to keep one’s tree and grazing livestock in separate paddocks.

Posted by hugoagogo on 24/11/11 at 04:12 PM

Regardless, timber from nitens over 15 years of age require more chemical treatment to produce good quality paper.
The heartwood develops with age in all hard woods. As the annual ring width decreases with age so the proportion of heart wood to sap wood increases. Nothing can alter that fact.
Clogging up the pipes is less important than the fact that lignin turns the paper yellow.
Age is the only alchemist which can turn white sapwood into dark heartwood.
Dr Gordon Bradbury seems to be one of the few voices of sanity in the Tasmanian Forestry scene.
There are others of course but the most vociferous seem to belong to the plantation pulpwood brigade.
Tending good quality young trees is what forestry management was. Not this napalm bombing of cleared sites, reseeding and shutting the gate to return to repeat the process 15 years later.
Young Blackwood trees require shelter in their early years, other wise they stand still shivering, like starving children. They are not a pioneering species.
Sequoia sempervirons would be a excellent species for under-planting but the soft, fire resistant bark seems to be attractive to cattle and even mature trees are often ring barked.
Unfortunately John Le Greche introduced the Radiata instead of the Californian Redwood which comes from the same area. Otherwise it would be widely grown.
You have been watching too many old cowboy films with the Texan longhorns. Except for a few Highland cattle which breeds still retain their horns these days.?
In any case I had mainly sheep in mind for grazing.

Posted by J A Stevenson on 25/11/11 at 07:31 AM

I guess that you were too young at the time that Forestry Tasmania threw away a few million dollars on planting blackwood under pine Hugo?
Pity as you could have saved the taxpayers a lot of money , 1200 ha of blackwood under pine with only the pine ever to be harvested is a real waste, especially as mangnificient eucalypt mixed forests were trashed to put it in.
It gets to me that there is no scrutiny of where the money goes.
I wish Gordon Bradbury all the best with his project, I have planted about 30 blackwoods on my place, not to cut down but for shelter/shade trees. They seem to grow fine.

Posted by Pete Godfrey on 25/11/11 at 08:31 PM

I find it amusing that anyone so prominent on TT should be seeking government funding in order to establish a timber plantation.

Posted by VoiceofSanity on 26/11/11 at 08:25 AM

I agree with you VoiceofSanity (#5). There is a degree of hypocrisy in my position. I would love to get 100% private investment in my blackwood coup proposal. And if we had fully commercial, competitive, transparent markets in forest products in Australia I think I would be able to achieve that. Under these conditions blackwood sawlogs would be achieving prices that clearly demonstrated to everyone that growing blackwood was a profitable investment. This will soon be happening in New Zealand once their farm-based blackwood plantations reach commercial maturity.
But that is not the situation we have. Instead we have forest product markets subject to constant Government commercial and political control and intervention. Hence the mess that the forest industry finds itself in and the need for even more Government handouts.
The funding that I’m seeking under the TFIA accounts for only approximately 25% of the running costs of the coop according to my budget model. The remaining money will be contributed by coop members in establishing and managing their own private plantations. And once the plantations reach commercial maturity and harvesting commences they will be sold by open auction or tender to achieve the best possible financial returns for coop members, and the coop will then be self funding.
So under the circumstances I’m prepared to accept some hypocrisy until forest industry policy and practice are reformed and proper commercial forces can operate freely.
Cheers!

Posted by Dr Gordon Bradbury on 26/11/11 at 09:31 AM

Re: # 4 I suspect this may have occurred due to a misunderstanding between inter-planting and under-planting.
Every timber tree needs a clear view of the sky to grow, even heavy shade bearing species.
Your description of trashing a magnificent crop to plant another species was mirrored in the Forest of Dean in the UK by the Forestry Commission.. An area containing some young 40 year old oaks were ring barked in order to plant softwoods at the height of the wood chip planting boom just before it bust on the hardwood wood chip boom. Now the hardwood chip market is bust, Norske Skog have reverted to softwood for pulp in Tasmania.
My original suggestion of inter-planting with Blackwood was based on observing a plantation struggling to grow in an open site and and others growing in the company of a different species.
As many of these nitens plantations are growing past their best sell by date for chips and not worthy of being classed as saw logs this seems a very good opportunity to make use of them as nurses while continuing to grow into useful timber. Some thing they will never do if left unattended.
Perhaps Dr Bradbury should concentrate his efforts in utilising nitens nurses to establish a crop. Grown under these conditions with side shade, sharp secateurs should not be required.

Posted by J A Stevenson on 26/11/11 at 09:50 AM

#7 I believe that the plantings of Blackwood that Forestry Tasmania put in were all a cloak and dagger routine.
I am sure that when they were planted in the 1980’s there was enough science to tell them that the nurse crop had to be removed before it overshadowed the Blackwoods.
Their original plan was to remove the pine at 20 to 25 years and then to grow the Blackwood on until 45 years. Not old enough for the blackwood really but far too old in the case of the pine.
The pine grew too well.
I have read that on some plantations on private land the pine trees were left too long and had to be ring barked and left to stand as it was not possible to remove them easily and save the blackwoods.
To grow them as an interplanted crop they have to be spaced far enough to allow the nurse crop to be removed without killing the actual crop.
I suspect that I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here.
Thankyou for your valuable contribuitons and for trying to get our recalcitrant industry to change to real forest practices.

Posted by Pete Godfrey on 26/11/11 at 11:34 AM

I think it’s a terrific idea.

Seems most, in and out of the industry are saying that the forest industry has to change, that there should be more of a focus on value adding.

All 3 parties (liberals, labor, greens) have all suggested speciality species is something they support. So in that regard there should be a tripartisan agreement … that helping to develop a new long term sustainable industry should be given appropriate consideration.

Which of course begs the question, (in the essence of ‘once in a generation’ and all that) shouldn’t at least some of that state/federal government money currently going towards paying out failures, such as Gunns, FT, the associated businesses they have brought down with them, also go towards helping develop an new industry?

This is the sort of initiative which, if supported, could see a win win for not only communities, all parties, and help prove our MPs (regardless of creed), can work together to help create or at least be part of creating, a new prosperous ‘sustainable’ forest industry for the future.

Do we have the polly’s (who basically run the money bag) who can think, act, envisage, support communities, something, anything beyond the next corporate donation?

Posted by Claire Gilmour on 26/11/11 at 07:44 PM

#9. Clair Gilmour, yes we certainly do have an abundance of pollies that act and spend as though we have mega plantations of money trees.

(As opposed to the plantations of virtually nil-profit mono-species that now mar the horizons where once stood our mighty Native Forests roaming freely aloft the distant mountains hills and valleys of Tasmania.)

Even today when the lucridity of this motley of Labor ministers still cannot see outside of the continuing ruinous destruction of our prime HCV Native Forests for some piddling amount of income toward our State revenue.

Perhaps the people of this State should really be giving their full-on support to Simon Warriner’s indipol proposals?

Posted by William Boeder on 27/11/11 at 11:36 AM

Nitens plantation would be ideal sites to trial this approach. Initially harvest two adjacent rows of trees, leave 6 rows and harvest two more and so on. When removing the two rows any obvious losers or worthless trees could also be removed from the adjoining row. How heavily this additional thinning s should be depends on local knowledge to wind exposure and site stability.
A point to bear in mind, are wind tunnels effects on exposed sites, even if it means side stepping the rows to break up wind patterns. Another means of preventing wind tunnels would be to frequently plant pines or Leyland Cypress wind breaks at frequent intervals..
Do not plant a mono species but a useful trial mixture could include Blackwood, Macrocarpa and Californian Redwood and suitable native species to create a balanced under story, including Leather wood. Two or three years later the middle two rows of the 6 would be removed,and further inroads made into two remaining rows to ensure a worthwhile crop of decent nitens milling timbers of 50 years of age. Early failures could be corrected and successes exploited.
A steady income would be obtained by selling successive harvests of nitens and a few of the inter planted trees later.
For this to succeed it has to be managed. A different mind set is required, you are not going to see any benefit from what you are doing but have the satisfaction of leaving something behind worthwhile when you are dead and gone. Some trees not to be felled for 150 years.
Thats forestry.
# 2 . What damage do possums, do peculiar to Blackwood trees?

Posted by J A Stevenson on 28/11/11 at 07:21 AM

#11 JAS

“What damage do possums, do peculiar to Blackwood trees?”

Preferentially eat them. A blackwood plantation set out in nice rows is like setting up a gourmet banquet for brushtail possums.

Unless, you can control possums effectively, by reducing their numbers in the immediate vicinity, the whole plantation venture and all the money expended on it thus far is at risk of being lost.

But as there’s no love for 1080 poison or shooting of TT, Hugo’s suggestion of Tibetan prayer flags (@#2) may be about as good as it gets

Posted by Mark Poynter on 28/11/11 at 09:30 AM

Mark, Do not possums eat other trees also? What about Eucalyptus and Pine.

Posted by J A Stevenson on 28/11/11 at 02:40 PM

#13 JAS

Yes, possums do indeed eat pine and eucalyptus plantation seedlings, but they seem to enjoy eating Blackwood seedlings even more.

Posted by Mark Poynter on 28/11/11 at 03:37 PM

On the issue of poisoning or shooting possums that may eat the trees. There have been trials that should be followed up, one product called WR1 from memory was a spray on repellent that included some sort of silica that made the young leaves unpalatable, it had egg white as a sticking agent and a few other additives that were all pretty benign.
Of course there is also fencing, there was a lot of fencing done around Blackwood/Pine plantations in the Lower Beulah area, of course that is expensive but then again so is Blackwood.
We don’t need to kill everything that eats trees it is possible to use repellents instead or as Mr Stevenson suggests mixed species.

Posted by Pete Godfrey on 28/11/11 at 04:32 PM

# Pete Godfrey

In fact WR1 also contains metal filings to give the possums a bit of an unpleasant mouthful that is meant to train them not to eat the trees.

Nice idea, and perhaps it works in some situations where browsing pressure is light. But the problem is that it doesn’t take too much rain to wash it off, and that as the seedlings grow, none of the new growth has the substance on it so can be eaten at will.

It is normally applied at the nursery prior to planting, so to try and re-apply it to planted trees in the field would be very expensive / impractical and I’m not aware of it being done.

I’m constantly reading on TT about excessive costs supposedly making forestry unviable. The costs of trying to control browsing animals (which are not endangered and are often present in plague proportions) in more sensitive ways is an example of making operations more expensive with only limited success. But of course this is never acknowledged by the critics as being a consequence of their own activism.

Posted by Mark Poynter on 28/11/11 at 07:02 PM

Well Mr Mark Poynter, it could be argued that activists could also have added to the costs of Native Forest predation and extraction by the blinkered opportunists whom are out to cut a few quick bucks out of the State’s Crown Lands?

What do you propose to do to remedy the cost-added burden resulting from all the human opposition to your State-wide forest slaughters?

Is it a fact that blinkered timber-getters do not contribute anything back to the once glorious forests, other than provide an enormous long term period to these lands to attempt to restore their former forested selves?

What do the “out of opportunity timber-getters do,” when they have “gotten” most all the forests once prolific through the Victorian mountain ranges?
You well know your industry is a slaughter-fest upon all of the indigenous wildlife species once so abundant?
These very same issues are alive and happening in Tasmania as well as your home State.

No matter the amount of sleek satin and soft silk adorning language you choose to try to defend your predator industry, maybe you might find the time to address the damning legacy of your super-spieled Native Forest clearance activities, then, to please do tell the Tas Times readers about this side of your industry instead of pretending this major issue of wildlife extermination does not exist?
Thank you Mr Poynter.

Posted by William Boeder on 28/11/11 at 08:16 PM

In the UK it is impossible to plant trees without the use of fences against Rabbits and Hares. Tree shelter are now widely used against Muntjac, Roe, Fallow Deer have become endemic after escaping captivity during the war years. Large areas, as in Scotland, can be protected by fencing against Red Deer but except for very large areas the cost would be prohibitive.
To the above pests must be added Voles which live in the grass and ring bark the plants in winter, foxes and owls are the foresters friend. Now another insidious pest is wreaking havoc. The Grey Squirrel. Possums should be a minor worry.

Usually Tuley Tubes are used, these are plastic tubes about 15cm diam. 4 to 5ft high. Most species of trees grow well in them, sheltered and enriched by the carbon dioxide which seems to collect. It would take a very agile possum to leap from the ground to attack the trees when it emerged from the shelter 120cm above.

Two dangers using them are. Unless care is taken grass can also take advantage of the shelter and out compete the tree the first year. This is overcome by sliding up the tube and pulling out the grass so it lies outside the tube and seeds. If the grass is cut off it will regrow with renewed vigour. Tubes are left on the trees as they grow and eventually the growing tree stem meets the tube, some smooth barked trees seal the tree against the tube,water draining down the stem and into the tube fills up the tube and the tree stem drowns.

Inspection is required and when the danger of this happening is observed the tube is split with a sharp knife and the tube lifted. Provided they were firmly staked no other problems occurred.
While this may seem expensive to Australian eyes of tree growing remember that one is aiming to produce a top quality product, which never comes cheap.

Since becoming interested in this Blackwood issue I followed Hugo’s advice and googled Blackwood. I located this excellent article by Rowan Reid.

Agree, it is a good article by Rowan Reid. His farm is in the foothills of the Otways in south west Vic in about 900 mm rainfall, and as you can see in the picture, the good tree is planted literally just a few metres from the creek, so its roots are probably accessing the watertable.

That’s the main point about blackwood, it grows widely, but only in some places can it grow to a suitable size for commercial use. So its site selection requirements are quite narrow.

Posted by Mark Poynter on 29/11/11 at 08:03 AM

Re: # 19 It was assumed that no one would embark on a planting exercise without getting expert advise as to suitability of species etc.

The land formation in Tasmania seems pretty general in most areas, perhaps this is why species = site selection seems to be ignored.

Posted by J A Stevenson on 30/11/11 at 06:59 AM

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